Victorian imagery was inadequate to express World War I's anxieties, so new experiments took up the task, with artists incorporating aggressive imagery of combat and its ruinous consequences. Here a visitor to the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany, examines Otto Dix's 1924 "Storm Troopers Advancing Under Gas."
How World War I changed art —
Victorian imagery was inadequate to express World War I's anxieties, so new experiments took up the task, with artists incorporating aggressive imagery of combat and its ruinous consequences. Here a visitor to the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany, examines Otto Dix's 1924 "Storm Troopers Advancing Under Gas."
Bernd Weissbrod/EPA/Landov
Gino Severini was among the painters of the Futurist movement that would flourish during the war, reflecting the mechanized violence of the time. Futurists served as avant-gardists in the literal military sense, says art historian Ara Merjian, underscoring the war's inseparability from various aesthetic phenomena. This is his pre-WWI Cubist collage "La Danse du Pan Pan au Monico."
How World War I changed art —
Gino Severini was among the painters of the Futurist movement that would flourish during the war, reflecting the mechanized violence of the time. Futurists served as avant-gardists in the literal military sense, says art historian Ara Merjian, underscoring the war's inseparability from various aesthetic phenomena. This is his pre-WWI Cubist collage "La Danse du Pan Pan au Monico."
PA Photos/Landov
On the Great War itself, the pacifist Pablo Picasso remained silent. But innovations with different media and materials -- as with "Musical Score and Guitar" -- influenced movements from war-mongering Futurism in Italy to pacifist Dada in neutral Switzerland, says Merjian.
How World War I changed art —
On the Great War itself, the pacifist Pablo Picasso remained silent. But innovations with different media and materials -- as with "Musical Score and Guitar" -- influenced movements from war-mongering Futurism in Italy to pacifist Dada in neutral Switzerland, says Merjian.
Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images
Not all European artists expressed the period's anxieties in the same manner. Giorgio de Chirico's "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street" (1914) conjures post-apocalyptic stillness and disquieting anticipation. A girl rolls her hoop across a sunny square, unaware of the hearse that looms in shadow -- the metaphor, perhaps, of a continent hurtling toward the void.
How World War I changed art —
Not all European artists expressed the period's anxieties in the same manner. Giorgio de Chirico's "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street" (1914) conjures post-apocalyptic stillness and disquieting anticipation. A girl rolls her hoop across a sunny square, unaware of the hearse that looms in shadow -- the metaphor, perhaps, of a continent hurtling toward the void.
Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images
Jacob Epstein's 1913 sculpture "Rock Drill" glorified an inhuman mechanization and anticipated even the battle droids from the Star Wars franchise's prequel, "The Phantom Menace," at the century's end.
How World War I changed art —
Jacob Epstein's 1913 sculpture "Rock Drill" glorified an inhuman mechanization and anticipated even the battle droids from the Star Wars franchise's prequel, "The Phantom Menace," at the century's end.
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
The British Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth not only painted canvases, but also supervised the "dazzle" camouflage (an angular patterning of black and white paint) of over 2,000 ships for the British Admiralty. Here airmen and seamen cheer King George V from the Argus.
How World War I changed art —
The British Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth not only painted canvases, but also supervised the "dazzle" camouflage (an angular patterning of black and white paint) of over 2,000 ships for the British Admiralty. Here airmen and seamen cheer King George V from the Argus.
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